What the Lobster Shouted As It Boiled

What the Lobster Shouted As It Boiled at 7.30pm

Lucy and Macca in Lost Youth at 9pm

Etcetera Theatre, Camden Town, London, Friday, August, 3rd

The Etcetera Theatre is a tiny theatrical venue in North London. Inside a Camden pub a door opens into a theatre. Like a scene from the children’s cartoon Mr Ben, a prosaic scene becomes something else. ‘What the Lobster shouted as it Boiled’ is a one-man stand-up routine that cleverly combines some songs, a painting, some acting, an all-round comedy event. Quite a lot is demanded of William Tombs, who delivers a fast-paced set that seems confusing yet is successfully integrated and explained by the end. The relatively cerebral content may be a distraction but Tombs engaged well with his audience, the content was not too distracting. A successful, funny, and surprisingly interesting show. Tomb’s is definitely someone to watch.

The second piece, ‘Lost Youth’ by Lucy and Macca, is more robustly comic, perhaps less cerebrally intriguing than the first set with lots of good ventriloquism from Lucy Watson. Basically the set concerns futurity for young adults, all those things we forgot to do in the hurly burly of feeling the need to go somewhere, then feeling that nothing has actually been achieved by the time we reach 30. Okay, we all know that horrible feeling, the aging process. This play delivers some laughs and observations about the dreaded creep of the wrinklies and other indicators of the aging process. Some nice touches were created by additional material generated from an Apple Mac notebook onto screen via projector. There were genuine laughs, Lucy was funny in a series of disguises, as a new female answer to the Bay City Rollers or as an American rockette.

Paul Murphy, Camden Town, London

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